Little bit of help needed please with .docx support theory

[fishyfish]

Purely for fun Ive been tinkering with the idea of making a basic word processor with support for .docx files.
Ive always gotten a bit out of a kick out of (for lack of a better word) "interperative" type code (have ported a few dozen emulators to aros and os3.x, but while fun its not the same as writing your own stuff), and as such have been looking for something unique (amiga wise) to have a play with.

I must admit though that Im a little out of my element here and my idea as to how it'd be done (perhaps an incorrect assumption, Im not sure) would be to "simply" write a parser of sorts which looks for tags in a file (much as an HTML reader does(my only real experience with anything like this)). Extending my html reader and adding css support was my other idea to scratch this current itch, but that's not as fun for me should I decide I want to make something useful from any code I write (networking programming isnt something I consider fun, and the obvious "extension" to an html reader is a full browser, hence my reluctance).

For now I just want to get something up and running that interperets a document and outputs the correct content to screen, even if only basic support.

If anyone can give me any feedback, ideas or suggestion Id appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

[hooverphonique]

is docx not xml? then you should be able to find a generic xml parser implementation in C and build that - you're then left with building the rendering part (make sure you don't "hardwire" it for screen only as that will make e.g. printing impossible).

another option would be to write your own light-weight/speed crossplatform xml parser if the whole point of this is to make something, that will work on multiple systems.

[absence]

The Office Open XML standard which defines docx & co is available here: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/Public...rds/index.html

And yes, docx is a bunch of xml in a zip file.

[fishyfish]

Thanks hooverphonique and absence.
Time will tell how "easy" it turns out to be, but Im surprised there's such limited docx support in amiga software seeing how widespread xml is.
Perhaps is just that its a (relative to the amiga) a pretty new standard introduced after its commercial software death. (*shrugs*).

[hooverphonique]

how about porting open office to the amiga? no, i'm kidding, of course :-D

Even if docx+co are iso standards, they are mainly used by M$, are they not? I mean, most other word processors don't use docx as their "main" file format...

[source]

Actually I would welcome a port of Open Office. I don't know how practical it would be but I would love to see it on the amiga. If it did come to be adding Final writer file support would be great. I know this is just a pipe dream, but you never know.

[absence]

Originally Posted by fishyfish

Im surprised there's such limited docx support in amiga software seeing how widespread xml is.

IIRC it's a rather complicated format.